


if the world’s a stage, mine’s a farce

by juurensha



Series: do we not bleed [2]
Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies), Guardians of the Galaxy - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M, Father Figures, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Parent Yondu Udonta, Sickfic, Teenage Peter Quill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-05
Updated: 2017-06-05
Packaged: 2018-11-09 04:57:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11097378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juurensha/pseuds/juurensha
Summary: It’s hard raising a Terran teenager, especially when he's allergic to most alien species and still insists on trying to sleep with all of them.





	if the world’s a stage, mine’s a farce

**Author's Note:**

> Okay who doesn't have parental Yondu feels after seeing that film? Anyway, that last scene with teenage Groot made me really want Yondu dealing with teenage Peter shenanigans, so here's my take.

“What the hell were you thinking, boy?” Yondu demanded, cuffing Peter’s head (lightly since it was all swollen, but only Kraglin was around to notice that), “Cozying up to a _Kree_ girl and then letting some A’askavarian chick _bite_ you?”

“You let Kraglin bite you all the time,” Peter muttered sullenly, barely managing to peer out at the two Ravagers from swollen eyes.

“Kraglin ain’t an _A’askavarian_ ,” Yondu said, pointing at his snickering first mate warningly, “And I ain’t no puny Terran. I thought Doc already went over all this with you. I told her to give you a test. Do you need to take the test again?”

“Can’t,” Peter replied, petulantly slumping down on the cot, “Can barely see anything.”

“Can always tell her to get in here and make you recite it,” Yondu threatened, brushing Peter’s hair back (god the boy’s face was starting to look as if he had walked into a swarm of nits despite Doc’s shots).

“Also feel like I might puke,” Peter said, glancing at a bucket on the ground.  

Yondu grabbed the bucket Kraglin handed him automatically and shoved it into Peter’s arms, “That’s what you get boy for sleeping with an _A’askavarian.”_

“We didn’t even do that much!” Peter protested, clutching at the bucket, “We just messed around a little—”

“She _bit_ you,” Yondu pointed out, “You ain’t got a nanite-enhanced system, boy!”

(He quickly suppresses the insidious thought that Peter might have something better though.

What are a few puny enhanced nanites to the blood of an immortal planet?)

“I didn’t know I’d have an _allergic reaction_ to her!” Peter complained.

“You’re allergic to about every other species in the galaxy,” Kraglin commented, digging a finger into his ear.

“And then chatting up a _Kree_ girl!” Yondu yelled, glaring at Peter, “What are the rules for you, boy?”

“Oh come on Yondu, I’m not twelve anymore—”

“The _rules_ ,” Yondu repeated, continuing to glare at Peter.

They stand in stony silence for a while until Peter blew out his cheeks (or tried to anyway, it was hard to tell with how much his face was still swollen up) and said sullenly, “If anyone tries to touch me in any way that makes me uncomfortable, I stab them in the nuts or the eyes and run away. Never stiff prozzies unless they attack you. If someone says no, back off because they can probably rip my spleen out. Don’t mess with the Kree.”

(Terrans aren’t nearly as rare as Centaurians, but Yondu ain’t taking no chances.

He’ll rip them all to pieces before he lets them take Peter the way they took him.)

“We were just _talking,_ Yondu,” Peter whined, his voice that wheedling pitch he got whenever he was lying (he still needed to train the boy out of that; he was starting to get too big to try and just make his eyes big and cute to get away with shit).

“Just like you and the A’askavarian girl were just ‘messing around’?” Yondu asked, making air quotes with his fingers.

“Her name is S’alna,” Peter said with as much dignity as anyone with a swollen head and clutching a bucket could, “And the Kree girl who I was just being _friendly_ with is Raha.”

“Don’t care if either of them are Gramosian duchesses, they’re both toxic for you,” Yondu snapped, “If you would just listen to me—”

“All you do is fuck robots and Kraglin!”

“Most of the time, _I_ fuck _him_ ,” Kraglin pointed out, scratching at his neck and dodging the elbow Yondu tried to stick in his skinny ribs.

Peter yelped and somehow managed to scrunch up his swollen face, “Too much information! _Way_ too much information! I need bleach for my ears and my brain! I’m going to be sick.”

Yondu rolled his eyes, “Quit your whining Peter.”

“No, I really am about to be sick,” Peter said before his face abruptly went white, and he started vomiting into the bucket.

“Doc! _Doc!”_ Yondu yelled, marching out of the room, head whipping around back and forth, looking around for the med-droid.

Doc whirred into the room and began to scan Peter while Peter heaved and Yondu paced back and forth and Kraglin rolled the IV stand out. The scanner beeped steadily, almost in time with Peter’s dry heaves (which wasn’t a reassuring sound at all), and after he placed a new bucket in Peter’s arms and shoved the full bucket at Kraglin, Yondu glared at the med-droid.

“Well?” he demanded, “What the hell’s wrong with the kid?”

“Severe allergic reaction. I’ll give him a shot, and then he’ll need more fluids and rest,” Doc replied placidly, clicking off her scanner and rolling over to the cabinets to take out some fluid-packs and a syringe.

“That’s it?” Yondu asked, anxiously watching as Doc stabbed Peter with the syringe and hooked the fluid-pack into the IV stand and attached it to Peter’s arm.

“That’s it,” Doc replied, whirring back as Peter’s dry heaves seemed to subside.

“You sure?” Yondu pressed, eyes fixed on Peter’s face (he seemed slightly less red and blotchy. That was a good sign right?)

“Seems so, although he should be dead; A’askavarian saliva is supposed to be toxic to Terrans when it hits their bloodstream,” she shrugged, “Maybe the literature is wrong.”

(Ego had had an A’askavarian kid.

Grumpy little thing named K’affa. Peter hadn’t been like him at all; he had been more like the Luphomoid girl Carith at first: weepy as hell.

But if that jackass could somehow have ogre, Luphomoid, A’askavarian, Terran, and void knew what else spawn, maybe it makes sense that Peter is somewhat immune to most of the things Doc has said would kill him over the years.)

“Can I have some water, Yondu?” Peter managed to croak out, lying back on the cot, swollen face regaining color but still too close to the color of the sheets for Yondu’s liking.

“Better make it electrolytes,” Doc said, throwing away the syringe, “There’s some in the starboard medical bay.”

“Why the hell aren’t there any here?” Yondu snarled, turning to go down to the other medical bay.

“This isn’t the hangover ward; this is the battle ward,” Doc said calmly.

(And that’s right, he’d been too freaked out by the frankly alarming size Peter’s head had swelled to do much besides toss him into the nearest medbay.)

“Whatever; stock some in here too,” Yondu blustered, pointing at Doc before striding down the hall, followed quickly by Kraglin.

The stamp of their boots echoed down the clanging metal hallway as Yondu’s thoughts swirled and twisted.

(Doc said the boy was fine, and Doc was the best med-droid money could buy, or at least she had been nearly ten years ago when he had decided to keep the boy to both spite Ego and save him and maybe he had harbored a secret unsaid hope that just maybe Starkar would let him back into the fold.

But it’s not like raising the kid raised the others back from the dead, so fat chance of that.

None of the other kids had displayed any unusual quirks, besides an unholy gift for wiggling into tiny spaces, but all of them had been children, and who knew what half-living planets went through when they hit puberty.

Obviously it had turned Ego into a child-killing, omnicidal grade-A jackass, but besides having a silver tongue and the fact that Yondu wanted to throttle him half the time, Peter was not nearly as smarmy as that bastard.

Still, who knew what happened when you mixed a talking bastard of a planet with a Terran; for all any of them knew, all Peter needed was some A’askavarian toxin in his system to suddenly go sceptic and be gone like all the others—)

“He’ll be fine, captain,” Kraglin broke in, bumping shoulders with him, “You remember that time before that Aakon casino job when one of his vestigial organs or something got worked up?”

Yondu shuddered. Peter had slumped around all week complaining that he felt weird before vomiting and collapsing the day before they had been supposed to shake down an Aakon casino on Rescorla. It wasn’t even a weird living planet thing according to Doc; just a regular Terran appendix. Goddamn Terrans and their weird vestigial organs that could randomly decide to kill them.

“Doc operated, and next day he was back to begging us to let him join us on the job,” Kraglin continued.

Yondu grunted, “Job was already a day behind, and kid could barely walk, so we left him behind. Except then he hacked Doc, got into a spare M-Ship anyway, and put those secret piloting lessons of yours to use.”

Kraglin shrugged, “You know Peter; he wouldn’t stop pestering.”

“Only reason ain’t either of you dead is because we had to use that ship to get away in,” Yondu muttered.

(That one day delay had caused the original plan to get jumbled, and most unfortunately the security rotations to change. They had all frantically piled onto Peter’s ship with all the loot, and Yondu had passed an excited, squirming and complaining Peter off to Kraglin to deal with while he took over the controls of the M-ship.

He hadn’t known if he had wanted to throttle or hug the kid, but since the crew was around and flush with credits, he settled on letting Peter having the run of the replicator that night, allowing him to punch in the order for as much weird frozen Terran dessert called cold cream or something that he liked so much.

He had Doc stand by in case the kid started vomiting again.)

“Could be worse, captain. We could have been sent to pick up a dark elf,” Kraglin mused, hands in his pockets, “I hear they don’t function at all in the light.”

Yondu rolled his eyes, “Stop talking nonsense, you idjit. Dark elves ain’t real.”

“That’s what you thought about ogres too, and—”

Kraglin shut his mouth with a click, and his eyes flickered anxiously toward Yondu’s arrow holster at his hip and then back up to Yondu’s glaring face.

(The ogre girl’s name had been Onoda, and more than the fortune offered to him, although that had also been tempting, he had thought that surely returning a small child to her father couldn’t be against the code?

Didn’t all the Ravagers long for family in some way?

After all, this girl’s father wanted her, which was more than his own parents had done. Hell, it was practically a good deed, wasn’t it?

That was how he sold it to Kraglin when his first mate had voiced concerns about breaking a central tenant of the code, but it was hard to say that the credits hadn’t clouded his mind. Thoughts of being able buy up enough ships and heavy artillery to maybe finally keep his fears of the Kree coming for him at bay, had danced through his dreams, so in some ways, maybe it was both sentiment and greed that had damned him. Either ways, he dropped off Onoda with a pat on the head, a much heavier pocket, and the cheerful thought of families reunited.

When he came the second time with Carith in tow, Ego was still the only one to greet him. But still, he had thought that maybe Onoda had just been nervous about meeting her little sister since the ogre girl had been painfully shy, hiding behind boxes, corners, tables, and whatever else there was around whenever a crewmember that she didn’t recognize walked in, only coming out if Yondu stood there and basically rattled out said crewmember’s entire life story.

It would be good for the two girls to live together; Carith’s cheery disposition could rub off on Onoda’s shy one, and Onoda could comfort Carith at night when her lip started wobbling, and she started bawling about her mother again.

Win-win for everyone, and he got paid handsomely enough that he could buy that mining ship with lasers that Kraglin had been eyeing for bank jobs.

It wasn’t until he brought him K’affa, and there was no Carith running out to greet him, or a shy Onoda waving behind a pillar, that he started to suspect something was wrong.

And then he was hauled in front of a tribunal, and all of his worst fears were realized when Krugarr revealed that all that was left of the children were bones.

“I didn’t _know_ ,” he had pleaded, staring in horror at Krugarr’s projections of the caves of skeletons.

“When were you ever so naïve?” Aleta had sneered at him during the trial when he had said that.

And when had he ever been? People didn’t usually pay boatloads of credits for kids for a good reason, as he of all people should know.

And what else could he say after that?

The kids were dirt and dust because he had brought them there.

Kraglin had been spitting angry at his side, screaming at the Ravager high council long after Yondu had gone silent, calling them hypocrites because for all their outrage and anger, not one of them were going to make a move to actually stop Ego.

He didn’t stop yelling, even when Starkar looked fit to throw him out of an airlock, so Yondu whistled and pointed the arrow straight at Kraglin’s neck until his first mate grudgingly backed down.

They’ve only ever really talked about it once, when Yondu had been entering the coordinates to pick up the Terran boy Ego had called in.

“We’ll go into deep space; lots of jobs out there, and that jackass ain’t going to be able to find the boy out there neither,” Yondu had said.

“Why are we going to keep him?” Kraglin had asked, frowning at the screen, “Can’t we just give him to some family on Xandar or something?”

“And it turned out so well, last time we left a kid with someone,” Yondu had replied, not bothering to look at his first mate.)

There hadn’t been anything to say after that, and there wasn’t much to say about it now, so they got to the hangover medbay in silence, and Yondu ignored his inebriated crew lying around in the cots as he dug through the drawers to get an electrolyte drink.

“Here,” Kraglin said, digging through the fridge and offering him a cold plastic bottle.

Yondu grabbed the bottle from Kraglin’s hand without saying a word and turned to stomp away back to the other medbay, except footsteps were clanging down the hallway, and Tullk came running into the medbay, only skidding to a stop when he saw Yondu and Kraglin.

“Captain!” he said, snapping off a quick salute, “Lirson’s mad; he says he ain’t got space for his creative juices to flow, or something like that, and now he’s throwing coats and needles at everyone—”

“I’ll take care of it,” Kraglin cut in, patting Yondu’s shoulder and sliding right by him, “Don’t waste your time, sir.”

(On one hand, he should whistle and let Kraglin know in front of the crew that _he’s_ the one who decides what’s a waste of his time or not, not Kraglin.

But on the other, Lirson’s weird artistic fits were par for the course, and the entire crew knew it. And Peter was still sick.)

“Fine,” he grunted, waving Kraglin and Tullk off as they went to restrain the Galiean tailor.

Walking back to the battle medbay, Yondu noticed an odd weight in his coat, so he stuck his hand in his pocket and drew out a plastic lime green thing with yellow dots for eyes, a swirl on its head, and cone-like ears.

It was adorable.

It was also pure sentiment; sentiment from his light-fingered first mate, no less.

He should throw it away or bury it in the heaps of other cute doodads in his quarters and ignore whatever slight tightening of the mouth or sad-eyed looks Kraglin would give but—

But it’s not like the crew would _know_ that a new adorable critter on his dashboard was a gift from his first mate. They’d probably think he just picked up a new one.

Of course Kraglin would know, but Kraglin followed him into exile and has been keyed to his biolock for over a decade now.

Still, he can’t come off as soft or nothing, so he’d give Kraglin latrine duty for a week, and then they’d be square.

More or less anyway.

He’d make it up to him at night.

It was a pleasant thought, and so it was with that and a cute figurine in his pocket that he re-entered the medbay and was cheered to see Peter’s face looking closer to its normal pink Terran tone.

“Here, boy,” he said, tossing Peter the electrolyte drink.

Peter caught it deftly with both hands, “Thanks Yondu,” he said gratefully, opening the bottle and proceeded to guzzle half of it down.

“You learned your lesson on A’askavarians now?” Yondu asked, grabbing the bottle and setting it to the side before the boy could make himself sick again.

Peter nodded quickly, “Yep; from here on out, it’s going to be strictly platonic between me and S’alna and any other A’askavarians I meet.”

Yondu grinned, “Good. Then I’m going to let Doc here give you a refresher course on ‘cross-species’ nookie-nookie.”

Peter’s mouth fell open, “ _What?_ Yondu, I already took that—”

“And there’s going to be a test at the end,” Yondu continued, his grin simply growing wider, “And if you fail, Doc gives you the course and test again _and_ you get latrine duty for a week.”

Peter’s face now resembled one of the cute sad-eyed ghost figures he owned, “What the _hell_ , Yondu?”

“And if I catch you sneaking around with a Kree girl again, it’s going to be nav-charting duty for a month instead of flying. And you still ain’t too big to eat Peter.”

(More nav-charting would be good for the boy anyway.

Make it less likely that he could get stranded somewhere in the middle of space with nowhere to run.

He needs to start the boy on inventory soon too. It’s boring as hell, but a Ravager that doesn’t keep track of supplies is bound to turn up short at the worst possible time.)

“Ugh Yondu, you suck!” Peter said, crossing his arms, “You don’t want me to have a life!”

“Trying to make sure you still have one,” Yondu replied, waving at Peter over his shoulder as he walked out of the medbay, “Doc, you restrain him if you have to.”

“Certainly Captain. Now, Peter, let’s watch this video again about A’askavarian reproduction.”

Peter managed to pass the test to Doc’s approval within a day or two, and then the Kree girl tried to knife Peter for sneaking off with the A’askavarian girl, so thankfully that put an end to that. Sadly however, Peter in a fit of teenage pique managed to once again hack the ship’s intercom system to play nothing but his annoying mix tape on repeat in the middle of a sleep cycle.

“Empty night, I hope he knocks some girl up, and then _he’ll_ get stuck with some brat to manage,” Yondu groaned, rolling over and trying to block out the latest repetition of “hooked on a feeeeliiiing” by dragging a pillow over his head.

Kraglin shook his head, burrowing his face into Yondu’s back. “Nah, captain, with our luck, he’d unload the brat on us and run away.”

That did seem sadly likely.

“Or he’ll get attached, and then there will be two of them, and we’ll still have to take care of both,” Kraglin continued, wincing as the track switched to that dumb blue suede song.

That seemed sadly even more likely.

“How the hell did he even get into the system anyway? Didn’t you lock him out?” Yondu asked, sitting up and digging the heel of his hand into his eye.

Kraglin shrugged, curling up into the warm space Yondu left, “He’s getting to be crafty.”

(And that was an agreeable thought, even if it was currently causing him a headache.

He didn’t know what he was doing half of the time with Peter, but if he could get him at the end of all this to be crafty enough to evade Ego’s clutches on his own—

It wouldn’t make up for Onoda, Carith, or K’affa, but if Peter is fine by the end of this, he might be okay with that.

Didn’t mean he wasn’t giving the boy latrine duty for a month though.)

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea about the timing of when the laser mining ship was bought, but I thought it would be ironic if it was bought using Ego's blood money. Ego's children are made up by me, as are their names (I tried) and sort of links to the Mantis fic I wrote earlier. 
> 
> Hope you liked it! Please leave kudos and comments!


End file.
